Archive For February 27, 2017

If there’s one thing you’ll encounter in a perusal of internet message boards, blogs, and the Business shelves of your local bookstores, it’s methods for planning your day. They’ve got all kinds of snazzy names, like Inbox Zero, the Pomodoro method, Getting Things Done, Blast Jumping, etc. All of them are equally valid and worthless,…

Taking the first step on any path, I feel, is the hardest. There’s that inertia, the desire to stick to what you know. Walk for a while in the unknown and there might be monsters. You might get lost. You might lose. Or get eaten. That last isn’t too likely, unless your path takes you…

One of my most valuable possessions is a notebook. Sometimes it’s high quality, a Moleskine or something similar, other times its no different than the large spiral-bound ones I had in school. It all depends on what I can get when I fill the old one. The notebook is my first step when I have…

So this week I’m focusing on the dirty part of the job – planning out what to write and when. Not story outlining, which is worth its own series of posts, but the forest view. That way-out-there perspective that helps to answer the question “What the *$#% am I doing?” There are a slew of…

Most trilogies have what’s called “an arc” – that sweep from beginning to end in which the hero ventures forth, learns not to stab himself in the eye with a sword, meets the wizened sorceress and together they go and dunk the big bad in a vat of lava. In that scenario, book one has…

Dark Ice, book two in the Mercenaries trilogy, is a different beast than its predecessor. By that I don’t just mean that it’s a different novel, but rather that the types of challenges that you run into when putting together the middle book in a trilogy are wholly different than writing a first book, and…

For the final post-launch analysis on Wild Nines, I wanted to share some numbers and the thoughts on those. First, a disclaimer: I don’t have a final royalty amount because page reads, a perk of being in Kindle Unlimited (and the sole reason for exclusivity), are tabulated later in the next month. I’ll estimate what the…

As you might have gathered from the title, this section of the post-launch series for Wild Nines is going to take a look at what I’ve done and didn’t do for the marketing side. That’s the hidden other element to being a writer – getting people to actually read what you put down. To sum up: It’s harder than…